


On the Virtues of Matrimony

by thedevilchicken



Category: Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Genre: M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 06:08:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8360374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Fitzwilliam has never married.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [a_la_grecque](https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_la_grecque/gifts).



Fitzwilliam has never married. 

It is, of course, not at all the done thing for a man of his rank to remain a lifelong bachelor. Prior to his change in circumstance, the expectation was that as an earl's second son he would marry a woman of comfortable fortune to whom he might lend his respectable name and family connections if not, as it was quite entirely lacking, a fortune of his own. He had been cognizant of the facts of the matter from the very earliest possible age and he did not, in point of fact, resent them; such was simply the way of the world in which he lived, and of the sphere within that world which he inhabited. Until the time arrived at which he knew he shouldn't have to marry, he had assumed - quite naturally - that he one day should.

Marriage seemed to be of precious little import in his youth, though even then he understood that its importance would one day be paramount. His father's wealth saw him educated well, as fit his name, and then upon matriculation that wealth had purchased his commission to a well-respected regiment of regulars, as was then his preference. His regimental days had passed with remarkable alacrity, given his numerous postings overseas, and little thought was spared to the prospect of his future marriage. His thoughts at that time reached back more often to his days in Cambridge than they stretched forward to his misty future, though even away on the Peninsula he viewed his situation with a sense of quiet pragmatism: he determined to make his match and enter into matrimony by the age of thirty, should he return from war, which seemed to him a choice one could call neither excessively precipitous nor improperly deferred. 

Furloughed from His Majesty's service following injury abroad, Fitzwilliam - then raised to Colonel - had recouped his health at the regimental barracks by the sea in Kent. He then ventured inland from the coast and along the way he met his cousin, Darcy, by arrangement; they made their way onwards on horseback, in order that they make their yearly visitation with their mutual aunt at Rosings Park. The evening of their eventual arrival, the pair dined at their aunt's table with their sickly cousin Anne and the party in from Hunsford who constituted, on the whole, most agreeable companions. Afterward, as the extent of their male company - Mr. Collins having then departed for the parsonage - was in fact the two of them alone, Fitzwilliam and Darcy made free to remove their jackets and set to billiards in shirtsleeves, over port. 

"I find she is quite agreeable, your Miss Elizabeth," Fitzwilliam said, glass in hand, and Darcy glanced up from his low bend across the felted billiard table. He meant what he said: Eliza Bennet's lively conversation had lived up indeed to expectations, and Fitzwilliam thought he liked her very much. 

"One may hardly call her _mine_ , cousin," Darcy responded coolly, though the tilt of his chin and the flush in his cheeks as he returned to the game told a tale of quite a different nature. To some, perhaps, Darcy's manners and expressions were of the most impenetrable; Fitzwilliam, on the other hand, had the advantage of some years' close study.

Fitzwilliam set down his glass on the table's edge and set about the chalking of his cue, a teasing smile rising up to his cheeks. "Stuff and nonsense, Darcy," he said. "I cannot discern her feelings on the matter but yours are plain enough. And she is indeed a very lovely young woman. I confess, I find myself quite brimming with jealousy at your situation."

Darcy's pause was as measured and precise as was the expression on his face. "Jealousy for the lady's part, cousin, or for mine?" he asked, with a faint narrowing of his eyes, and Fitzwilliam might have surmised that his jest had passed his cousin by but for the fact that Darcy's response in fact cut to the quick of it. Darcy has never been what he could have called a fool. Darcy is quick of wit and clear of perception, now as he was then.

"Both together," he replied, brought reluctantly to gravity, and Darcy's mouth twisted to a point that might figure on a scale that one might plot between a smile on one extremity and a grimace on the other. Darcy set his cue to its place in the rack with careful precision, so careful in fact as to presage the next turn of their encounter: Fitzwilliam knew that the closer to undone his cousin came, the tighter the grip on control he tried to keep. Darcy set one hand at the small of his own back and took a breath while his back was still turned. Then turned and advanced most rapidly, rounding the corner of the billiard table with almost military precision. Fitzwilliam met him there in two quick steps, his own cue discarded in a moment on the tabletop. It was an old game, and they were old hands at it.

They met in a kiss. In certain society, a kiss may have been a proper, sanctioned greeting; this kiss was very far from proper, mouth to mouth with hands in hair, and all Darcy's control was by then lost. Fitzwilliam unbuttoned the flap of Darcy's pantaloons with singular purpose and Darcy himself was not unmoved by this; he took a deep, unsteady breath as Fitzwilliam's hand slipped in and pressed down lightly at his underclothes, as his fingers curled about his manhood, skin kept from skin by just the thinnest of fabrics. The action was familiar, as was the reaction. Darcy stepped back against the table and his fingers clasped white-knuckled at the edge of it. Darcy caught the tip of his tongue between his teeth and hissed in a shallow breath, while Fitzwilliam's mouth found the hinge of his jaw, found the side of his taut neck. Then Darcy caught Fitzwilliam's arm at the wrist and he eased back his hand, reluctant though that action seemed to be. 

Fitzwilliam stepped back. There was no mutter of _good God, man, anyone could see!_ , nor did Fitzwilliam much expect it; what he did expect occurred as Darcy lifted one hand to Fitzwilliam's shoulder and squeezed there warmly, tightly. He looked him in the eye as his jaw clenched, as he swallowed hard. 

"Come to bed," Darcy said then, his tone low and his voice constricted, and such a surge rose up in Fitzwilliam's breast that he could not but agree. The two of them retired to Darcy's room. They did not leave it till the morning. 

\---

Fitzwilliam returned to the wars three months later. He returned from the wars three years after that. The age of thirty had passed Fitzwilliam by, and he remained unmarried; he had never even made an offer. There had been much more pressing matters to attend to, though he knew his own mind far too well to believe that the only reason for his reluctance. 

He met Darcy at the London home of a Mr. and Mrs. Davenport, some weeks following his return to England from the continent. The gentleman, third son of a viscount from the West Country with whom Fitzwilliam's path had once or twice converged, had married a lady of some considerable fortune and they did, in their way, seem quite happy of it. Fitzwilliam, then thirty-two years old, danced with many eligible young women in his fine regimental coat, and was quite admired for his gentlemanlike manners, though his eye was fixed quite firmly on another of the party. Darcy did not dance. 

"Where is your wife, cousin?" Fitzwilliam asked, as they chanced to meet on the veranda. 

"She has been visiting her friend Mrs. Collins at Hunsford these past three weeks," Darcy replied. "Tomorrow I return to the north to be reunited with her."

Fitzwilliam nodded. "Is our aunt still very cross?"

Darcy moderated a smile back into seeming indifference, though Fitzwilliam caught that moment of amusement. 'Yes," Darcy replied. "I believe she shall always be so, though she might well welcome a visit from another nephew."

Fitzwilliam understood. And, perhaps, their cousin Anne might have made as good a bride as any ever could have for a near-penniless colonel returned lately from the wars, but Fitzwilliam found he could not have it. He was then not yet so poor as to turn his attentions in that precise direction. 

Soon after, it became apparent that Georgiana was there in town with her brother, and present at the ball; he danced with her quite gladly, more than once, though he and her brother spoke little more that night except of their respective health and the health of their mutual acquaintances. Afterwards, the Darcys left by coach for their own townhouse while Fitzwilliam returned, on foot, to his rather meager lodgings. He did not feel the walk despite the autumnal chill of the midnight air; he had seen much worse overseas, and walked much farther, and under greater duress from the fire of artillery than the light shower of rain could provide. For all the hardship of those days abroad, he found then he might have had a preference for it. His manners were still quite as polished as they ever were, but society had tired him. 

He called on the Darcy household the next morning, and found only Georgiana present as her brother had already left. It was pleasant to see her again, and she seemed to him quite pleased to see him; they sat together side by side at her pianoforte as she played, and he even fumbled about the lower hands of a short duet or two with her himself. His hands had become much more accustomed to the weight of a rifle than the keys of any instrument, he feared, and he told her so quite plainly, and she was kind. And when, a fortnight later, he heard not insubstantial but highly unsubstantiated murmurings that he would shortly marry Georgiana Darcy, he supposed he had only himself to blame. 

This would have proved a neat solution to his problem, yes, but he felt the impropriety of that notion keenly. He had been her guardian once, and could not think to marry her because of it, not for an instant, at least not any more than he could find it in him to marry their cousin Anne, and so his almost daily visits ceased abruptly. He missed her company quite sorely. He missed her brother's even more so, but that had been his cross to bear for many years, since Cambridge or perhaps before. 

In the morning of the seventh day since his last visit, his cousin Georgiana came to call. She extended to him an invitation that he might travel north with her two days hence, were he not otherwise engaged, and he was not, nor could he fabricate a reason to decline her. Those two days passed but slowly and then they stepped into the coach and headed north, by quieter and safer roads than he had ever travelled while abroad, and Georgiana was indeed still quite engaging. 

The party at Pemberley passed a pleasant month together through the autumn. Bingley was in attendance with his wife and his sisters and Mr Hurst; Elizabeth's younger sister Kitty, Georgiana, Darcy and then Fitzwilliam himself completed the arrangement. They passed their days in walking, fishing, shooting birds though Fitzwilliam in that had quite the advantage of them all. The rifle felt familiar in his hands. He didn't flinch at the shots, or at the blood on the birds, or at the thought of eating them for dinner. And, in the evenings, Georgiana played and sang and Fitzwilliam spoke most often with Elizabeth who, to not very great surprise, was just as charming as she had ever been, those days years ago at Rosings. He believed he could have been almost as happy with her as his wife as Darcy clearly was.

"I understand you've yet to marry, Colonel," she said, not so very many days before the prospective date of his arranged departure, as they took a turn about the salon after dinner. "Are we to find you wedded to the regiment?"

She smiled, so he smiled in return. "I think I won't return to soldiering," he told her. "But the regiment and I have parted ways on happy terms."

"May I enquire, then: do you have plans for your future?"

"None at all, I'm quite ashamed to say."

She squeezed his arm. "Then perhaps we can hope you will stay at Pemberley a short while longer." 

He did not commit, though he was tempted to. He knew he should leave, for his own sake if not for theirs. 

The Bingley party left at the end of the fifth week since their arrival, to spend the winter down in London. Kitty Bennet stayed on, his cousin Georgiana's constant companion of all hours of day and night, and Fitzwilliam's own departure was scheduled for the morning. As they waved away the Bingleys' coach, Darcy looked at him sidelong there on the gravelled driveway. The servants trooped away, returning to their stations, and Darcy's hand curled urgently about Fitzwilliam's wrist. 

"I should like to speak with you, cousin," Darcy said. "It is a matter of some importance."

He went with him. He could not do otherwise. 

\---

In their university days, they shared a college if not precisely rooms beneath its roofs and while Darcy read most ably in the subject of mathematics, Fitzwilliam proved a much more willing student of the natural sciences. 

At the time, had he but had the finance of it, he had fancied himself a naturalist. In his youth, he had made a close study of the grounds of his father's estate, learning what he could, his skill with pen and ink coming on prodigiously. At college, he inked illustrations for great biological volumes put out by his professors, depictions that he flattered himself were all quite true to life. He was paid for the work, but the payment was not the reason that he did it; he did the work because it pleased him of itself. However, he knew this was not a way a gentleman might make his living. There would be far from enough in the way of coin to keep his finances secure. He understood that he would have to marry. 

He and Darcy had come up together, along with Darcy's father's steward's son. He has to confess that he once liked George Wickham, before he was caught in lodgings with their college porter's daughter, and she was hardly the first, nor was she the last. They kept little society with Wickham after that occurrence, and put on gowns and went to hall and ate together instead, attended their seminars together, the two young men near-constant companions. They had passed much of their youth together, in months spent at Pemberley or Rosings Park or at Fitzwilliam's family home in Derbyshire, not fifty miles distant from Darcy's own. Their mothers were great friends, the very closest, and so in turn were they. At Cambridge, they turned closer still. 

The two gentlemen were of a height as they walked the halls together, quite tall with features that, although they bore a striking similarity one to the other, had arranged themselves more happily in Darcy's face than in Fitzwilliam's. Their general structure was again of a similar sort, and indeed in those days they were more than once mistook as brothers more than cousins. Fitzwilliam knew Darcy's face perhaps more closely than his own then as he sketched it more than once; Darcy posed for him as if for a painting destined for the gallery at Pemberley, though the manner in which Fitzwilliam drew him was not quite so romantic. He drew him as if for a great text of anatomy, correctly and with close attention to the very meanest detail. Darcy's proud countenance was produced onto the page, his dark eyes and dark curls, the frill of his cravat and the starch of his high collar, the sum of him collected there inside Fitzwilliam's sketchbook. 

By the time they reached six months in Cambridge, Fitzwilliam's drawings had quite altered, and the Darcy he drew then was no longer proud by any means at all, no longer sat as he might for a portrait of any dimension or proportion. It had started innocently enough, the practice of Fitzwilliam's art in the sketching of Darcy's hand or foot or eye, his teeth, the tracery of veins beneath his forearms. Soon, however, he had asked Darcy to strip to the waist so that he might make closer examination of his collarbones beneath his skin, the notches of his spine down the length of his back, the muscles in his chest and abdomen. Darcy permitted this near-mutely night on night, the examination of Fitzwilliam's fingers at his skin, the study of Fitzwilliam's pen on paper, putting him down in every particular. 

Soon, Fitzwilliam asked him to remove his clothes entirely, a request to which Darcy gave his free consent. His fingers probed the lines of Darcy's muscles, followed bones; his pen sketched out knees and ankles, hips and thighs, sketched rounded buttocks, calf muscles, heels. By and by, he came to Darcy's manhood, long and thick, to testes and to perineum that stretched out smooth behind. Darcy's face was flushed as he touched him there. Darcy's cock swelled as they'd ignored so many times before, though this time Fitzwilliam did not - could not - ignore it. He licked lightly at the head of it and Darcy groaned aloud like ecstasy. Fitzwilliam did not stop. 

Perhaps there were no porters' daughters for the two of them, but that did not mean to signify a total chastity. Their college days were not chaste. There were repeated improprieties beneath the old stone porticoes when passions ran high enough that waiting for the safety of closed, bolted doors had not been viable. There were darkened spaces behind those closed doors once candles were extinguished and servants retired to beds, their gentlemen alone at last. No, those days were not chaste. Fitzwilliam wished they would not end. 

He even now recalls the knowing incline of the apothecary's head as he wrapped the stoppered bottle in brown paper in the little shop. He recalls the constriction of his chest and the warmth in his cheeks and the twist of excitement in his gut as he returned to college before the gates were locked. Inside the phial was a viscous oil that they didn't dare unstopper till they had taken off their clothes in their entirety and then retired to bed and Fitzwilliam then coated his fingers with it, and from there his rigid cock. Darcy watched him, avid-eyed, and spread his thighs out wide so that same stuff might be applied to his most intimate of places, too. 

Before, there had been youthful fumbling beneath one another's breeches, hands and mouths and once or twice the rush of their ejaculation between one another's thighs. That was the first night Fitzwilliam pushed his cock inside him in a stop-start rhythm that took away their breath entirely. Darcy still prefers that he be penetrated, though that's far from a rigid rule; sometimes their urges tend in another direction, though that evening they did not. They loved one another dearly even then, Fitzwilliam thinks, but when they passed their tripos, their liaison had to end. Fitzwilliam, for his part, had never quite managed to forget it. 

They went into Darcy's study, which had once been his father's and no doubt his father's father once before. They did not sit, just closed the door and Darcy leaned against the edge of his table, ill at ease, his hands thrust underneath his arms as if he'd caught a chill. Fitzwilliam waited, his own hands tucked in neatly behind his back, and for all his patience he could not fend off a frown. 

"What is it, cousin?" he asked. "Pray don't keep me in suspense. You look a fright."

Darcy grimaced. "It is only an idea, you understand," he said. "I have given this the most serious consideration and it is my hope that you will do the same before you answer." 

Fitzwilliam raised his brows and Darcy's countenance took cycles through such agonised expression that it could almost have been comical, but for his general demeanour. 

"I wish you will take stewardship of my estate," Darcy continued, as his gaze turned to the window and its outlook across the lawns. "The position has lately come vacant, and as such there is a great need to fill it. I am not unsensible that it is not so rich a prospect as you may find in marriage, but it would allow... Rather, it would permit..."

There Darcy's language failed him momentarily, and uncharacteristically, for Darcy has always been a most uncommonly excellent speaker when he sets to it. He took a breath. His gaze, finally, removed itself quite forcibly from the window and settled reluctantly upon Fitzwilliam. 

"I fully comprehend that this is hardly the kind of proposition one should make to the son of an earl," Darcy said. "But it would permit that you and I remain together, for the duration of your employment. Naturally, the position does pay well." 

He understood, of course. It was a pleasant sentiment, no matter the awkward turn of phrase with which Darcy had found fit to word it. It rankled, however much it caused his heart to race, that Darcy wished to _employ_ him, that his services might be bought and paid for, that the solution to his problem might be Darcy's charity. He had, after all, always reckoned upon marriage. He had not set his sights upon stewardships. He had never meant to be kept as Darcy's lover.

"I thank you for your most generous offer, cousin," Fitzwilliam said, regretting even as he spoke. "But I am not the kind of dockside trade that might condescend to suck your cock for sixpence." 

Darcy blanched, then all at once the colour rushed up back into his cheeks. "Sir, if this is the sense you make of all I've said to you, it seems you're rather more a fool than I had ever dared credit." Darcy shook his head. Darcy pushed away from the desk, and he shook his head again, quite vehemently. "This will not do. The position is respectable, and you are well qualified to take it. I mean only to improve your situation and if you do not wish to... If you have no wish to love me, cousin, after the fashion to which we were once accustomed, I beg you do not think this offer in any way dependent upon it." 

"You truly wish me to stay?"

Darcy nodded solemnly, as solemnly as only Darcy of Fitzwilliam's rather broad acquaintance had ever seemed to manage. "I do." 

"And your Elizabeth?"

"Good God, man, have you not understood this is a plan almost entirely of my wife's devising? Pemberley requires a steward. You have no fortune of your own. And I am...Elizabeth would say she sees I am quite half the man without you as I am with."

Fitzwilliam laughed. He clasped Darcy's shoulders in his hands, feeling rushing up in him. 

"Then with all my heart, I'll stay," he said. 

\---

These days, there is a door that opens up between their rooms. 

Perhaps the servants know and perhaps again their don't; they find Darcy the most kind and generous master they could wish to have and so Fitzwilliam believes there shall never be a rumour of it pass their lips. Perhaps this is an error on his part, but nine years have passed without a peep. Georgiana knows, of course, and cannot find it in herself to disapprove. They are happy. They are quite content. 

He calls the lady Lizzy, when they are not in company, and she smiles and takes his hands and leads him to the bed they share, whether Darcy is there with them or not. His master - which will sound droll until the ending of him - he will never call a thing at all but Darcy. They used their Christian names years ago, in their youth, but at Cambridge when they learned each other as much as they learned their subjects, they were Darcy and Fitzwilliam. So they shall always be.

Over the years, Fitzwilliam has slept the night in grand beds in grander houses and then again on hard, frozen ground with his jacket for a blanket and his horse's saddle for a pillow. The bed they share nightly there at Pemberley is every inch the former than the latter and more than big enough for three. Sometimes Darcy leaves for London, and sometimes Fitzwilliam rides there with him; sometimes they share a bed that is also theirs in the Darcys' London townhouse, and then return anon to Derbyshire. Sometimes Fitzwilliam stays behind when Darcy goes and he makes love to Lizzy. Sometimes it's Lizzy who leaves, to visit her sisters or her parents down in Hertfordshire, and Darcy and Fitzwilliam feel the bed is a fraction too large without her. She did this, after all, and Fitzwilliam finds he loves her just as dearly as he had ever hoped he'd love a wife. 

There is a door that opens up between their rooms to uphold a modicum of propriety, or at least the seeming of it. More often than not, the three of them are resident at Pemberley and, at night, Fitzwilliam enters through that door that is all that separates them, or they come to find him, one does, or both. Sometimes Lizzy watches them from across the room, as they remove cravats and shirts and breeches, as they put their hands on one another. Sometimes she watches as they kiss, as they lie down together, as Fitzwilliam gasps a breath and pushes into Darcy or the other way around. Sometimes Darcy has Fitzwilliam while Fitzwilliam has her. Sometimes, all they do is sit, and talk, and Fitzwilliam draws the two of them, their limbs entwined, passionate because his pen catches only what is there and not what's not. 

After dinner, Lizzy laughs and takes him by the hands and when she tugs him from his room and into hers, he goes. Darcy follows close behind and when they close the door, he steps up flush against Fitzwilliam's back, his arms cinched tight about his waist. With one hand reached back to Darcy's hair, Fitzwilliam holds Lizzy close and kisses her. And when he turns, Darcy's kiss is such as takes his breath away.

Fitzwilliam has never married, that is true. He took a job instead and found he's good at it, and for the rest of the world his lot in life is odd but quite exemplary: he manages the Darcy estate, and lives within the walls of Pemberley. Perhaps those outside looking in might think it sad he's lived so long a bachelor, unmarried, but his is an outward situation most can understand. Perhaps the wars changed him, and at least he's with his family now.

Darcy unbuttons Fitzwilliam's shirt; Elizabeth pulls it back and strips it from his shoulders. Darcy sucks Fitzwilliam's cock; Elizabeth sits back to watch. When he oils his cock and then makes breathless love to Darcy, he's making love to Lizzy, too. There is no need for jealousy amongst them.

Fitzwilliam has never married. But, of course, that is not to say he's never loved.


End file.
